The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman Julietta Henderson (short books for teens .TXT) 📖

‘And Sadie, I know I’m old, my dear, but . . . I see things . . . in you. I can see that you want to make Norman’s dream come true more than anything else in the world. I see that. But my question is, just what is it you’re so scared of?’ Bloody hell. Monday evenings in May, Psychology for Beginners? I decided it was entirely possible.

In the ensuing silence, I took a good, long look at Mr Leonard-all-learning-is-good-learning Cobcroft. He was gazing out to sea with a faraway expression, possibly reliving a border clash with ten thousand charging Chinese soldiers, or maybe just creaming butter and sugar to ice a cake.

Then it could have been the way his neatly trimmed eyebrows raised and lowered in time with his breathing, or the kindly glint in his dusty blue eyes as they turned back and locked on to mine, or perhaps it was just the right moment. I don’t know. It appeared Leonard had a bit of a knack of making me talk, and this time it was a story I hadn’t told to anyone in thirteen years. Not even Norman, the one person in this world I actually trusted. And after all those years of carrying around such a hot stone of truth in the pit of my stomach it rose to the surface with surprising ease.

I told Leonard about the countless Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday nights (oh, but never the big-ticket Fridays or Saturdays) that I’d spent waiting around in pubs and clubs for my father after my mum died. Making a dinner of lemonade and salt-and-vinegar crisps drag out as long as I could while he spilled his guts trying to get a laugh in some seedy venue in Eastbourne or Margate or the outskirts of Brighton.

How on one particularly memorable night, a Thursday as it goes, the manager of the Grand Hotel Eastbourne found a ten-year-old me crouched on the floor in a corner of the back bar, with my fingers in my ears and my eyes screwed so tightly shut I could see the stars and every single planet as sharp as a pin. Silently, desperately, willing the audience to laugh at my dad and apparently breaking all kinds of liquor laws in the process.

Night after night, year after year, the shows continued to go on, as they apparently must. But the spaces in between them got longer and the venues got smaller and emptier as it seemed to me my father got smaller and emptier himself.

‘You know, Norman’s favourite photo of his grandfather, the one you used on the poster, Leonard, that was actually taken on a night he played a show to two barmaids, a drunken chef and me. And I was asleep under his coat as soon as I’d finished my geography homework.’ Time to go home, love.

I told Leonard how I saw so much of my father in Norman, the boy he never met. The same hopefulness, the same intelligence, the same kind of sensitive soul that would go out to get dinner and come home with just a dozen eggs and a single head of broccoli because he’d given the rest away to the homeless man who lived under the bridge. But then we’d eat two-minute noodles with egg stirred through and a side of steamed broccoli and, somehow, my father would make it feel like a dégustation at Marco Pierre White’s. And he’d joke about how much that guy under the bridge would be enjoying his cold M&S chicken tikka for two washed down with a bottle of ginger beer, probably wishing it was a can of Tennent’s Super Lager. Ah, it’s so nice to be nice, Sadie.

I hesitated there, but then I heard Jax shouting, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound, Sadie,’ as he convinced me to bet all my matches (and lose) on a pair of sixes in a game of three-hand poker one rainy Sunday afternoon. And so I told Leonard how my father died.

Not a heart attack at all, like I’d told Norman and anyone else who’d asked, but by hanging himself from a beam in the kitchen of the house where we’d lived my entire life. The very beam where he’d painted the words ‘World’s Best Daughter’ in glitter paint for my sixth-birthday party. Bare, bony feet dangling over the table where the three of us had eaten countless breakfasts, lunches and chicken-hotpot dinners before my mum got sick. Where all my little six-year-old friends had eaten cake under the words that declared I was somebody. I was the world’s best daughter.

I kept on talking because Leonard didn’t tell me to stop. So I told him that my dad hadn’t worn socks to kill himself in January and I’d never know why. That the neighbour who’d found him also found a note tucked neatly into the fruit bowl between a banana and an apple that said, I’ve already hung around too long. That even the punchline of his last joke was far from funny, and for some reason that made me even angrier than the fact he was dead.

I told Leonard that note said everything anyone ever needed to know about Robert Foreman’s comedy career, and that I was terrified of all that Dad lurking around there inside Norman, having itself a gene-pool party. Because what if history spun back around on its bungee cord and repeated itself?

‘What if he . . . Leonard, what if, without Jax, Norman never gets to be as funny as he so desperately wants to be? As he . . . as he thinks he should be.’

That’s what I’m scared of, old man. In fact, it terrifies me to the very core of whoever the hell I am now I’m not the world’s best daughter. So how do you like them apples? Leonard’s breathing was measured and heavy like he was considering his answer carefully again, but it was also somewhat loud